Conspiracy Theories, Skepticism, and Critical Thinking

We’re hitting the final stretch of this book, and I realize with foreboding that I am going to have to find another one to keep going. I can say, without hyperbole, that I have probably read more of these conspiracy books than any other person. Not that I’ve read more conspiracy books, but that I’ve read more of the books. I’m actually reading them page by page and I doubt that anyone else has really done that. So, self-aggrandizement aside, even Webster knows that it’s time to wrap this thing up in a bow. She asks us to ponder the question that if the last 140 years of world history are not being directed by a single power then, “ how are we to account for the following undeniable facts?” Now, the last time she attempted to go line by line she absolutely flubbed it. To her advantage she hasn’t given us a specific number of undeniable facts so she’s learned from her earlier attempt. Her first is that the “ grievances of the people throughout this period have varied according to t...

  Works like this survive on vibes, and one of the vibes that they have to exploit is fear. Most of that fear is about changing the orthodoxy that the reader regards as “the default.” People hate change, especially Americans. An American will brag about surviving suffering rather than every question why they suffered in the first place. When the Communist/Socialists takeover (in Webster’s view these ideologies are the same), one of the cultural institutions that they target are the religious ones. From the perspective of the revolutionaries the reason that this is a necessary step is because religious institutions are part of the problem. The French revolution targeted the Catholic church because the Catholic church, at the time, was part of the oppression of the French peasantry. They not only blessed the Aristocracy they were inextricable from it. The Russian Orthodox church was the same. The Tsarist government was endorsed by the church and benefitted from it. What Webster lik...

We are treated to some long quotes by Lenin, the good one, the one that didn’t beat his wife and kid. The thing about Lenin is that he represents exactly the type of person that people like Webster hated: he was smart, educated, non-religious, anti-Capitalist, and Jewish (ethincally). He’s also quite the character in history. Lenin is the force of the Bolshevik revolution and an idealist willing to execute his position at nearly any cost. It’s hard to argue against Lenin aside from just disagreeing as well. He’s an idealist and moreso a true believer. So what, if anything is Webster going to do with him? Well, she’s going to just use his speeches to prove her point, what’s her point? That Bolshevism then is not Synidcalism, it is state Socialism, it is Marxism, it is Communism, in a word it is Babouvisme.” She’s arguing against something no one is saying. She quotes a twenty-line position of Lenin from one of his writings and then thinks that she’s breaking new ground by telling us t...

This chapter is titled “The Revolution of 1917;”   to which we assume our intrepid author means the Russian Revolution, the final toppling of the Romanov dynasty and the beginning of the USSR. This is the subject of the chapter, so it’s very odd that she writes the following, “ This is no the place to recount the story of the Russian Revolution, which is still too fresh in the minds of the public to need repeating…” If this is the case then why is the chapter titled this way? I have made the observation in my recounting of this book that no one really reads conspiracy books. They read the first chapter, which is also where the author has spent the most time crafting the book. The only reason to include a chapter titled “The Revolution of 1917” and then dismiss any need to actually write about that revolution is so it would seem that she did. If some hapless debunker asks, “well, what does she cover the Bolshevik Revolution?” the conspiracy believer can say, “Why yes, right here i...

The woozle effect is a method of arguing where you just place the responsibility of a piece of information on some source, then just repeatedly claim that the source said the thing. It doesn’t matter if the source said it or not because most people are not going to check and just assume that it’s true. This is Webster’s favorite conspiracy theory trick. The reader, by this point 2/3 of the way through the book, is just taking it at face value. She claims that the punishment for being an idler or objector to the syndicalist/socialist system is death, but we’ve seen no evidence for that. We have a quote, “ If a man will not work neither shall he eat!” and we are told that this is a rule that must be carried out by a Socialist state. We are given neither the source for this quote or a document which states that it is to be a rule. I’d even take one of her anti-Socialist writers saying it, but it’s just her attempt to imply that this is a thing. The attempt here is to frame Socialism a...

  “ Democracy is the land of plenty dreamt of by unscrupulous financiers ,” Webster quotes Sorel. This is the kind of comment where we must suspect that Webster either does not understand context is ignoring it because her audience won’t care. At this point in our journey, it should be apparent that Webster’s biggest crime is in committing the informal fallacy of cherry picking. She’s looking for out-of-context soundbites that she can then twist. We can see this from her footnotes where in successive citations she jumps from pg. 320 to 321 (ok, good), then to 186, 233, 112, 101, 236, and then 234.   Sorel, Georges Sorel, is being accused of harboring anti-democracy sentiments in his support of Socialism. Sorel thinks democracy is bad because of the corruption so we should assent to whatever it is that she wants us to think his solution is: probably some kind of dictatorship. We could however do a page hop citation for nearly any book to prove any point, this is why cherry pi...